1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to adjusting video quality and more specifically to adjusting how video is transmitted based on the degree of detected video degradation using network packet measurements.
2. Introduction
Streaming high amounts of data, and particularly video data, continues to become a prevalent occurrence as society relies more and more upon data networks for communication and business. Because of growing use and reliance upon video transmissions, any tolerances which once existed to degraded video connections are quickly disappearing. Designers of video transmission technologies generally respond to network degradation by decreasing the bit-rate an amount corresponding to the amount of network degradation detected. Video transmissions can be particularly sensitive to network problems such as lost packets, late packets, and out of order arrival of packets.
Unfortunately this response fails to quantify the impact of network degradation on video quality. This failure in turn generally leads to a single response for every type of degradation detected, regardless of how effectively that response will rectify or address that particular form of degradation. For example, video utilizing inter-frame (I-frame) compression eliminates redundancy in a sequence of frames by ignoring the still parts and focusing on the differences between the frames. If packet loss degradation occurs both in video utilizing I-frame compression and video not utilizing I-frame compression, the same level of packet loss may impair video quality at widely varying levels. Decreasing the bitrate could be appropriate for restoring video quality in the non-I-frame compressed video, but ineffective for the I-frame compressed video. Further, various codecs are impacted differently by the same type of network degradation.